SPCE — a lesson in meme-stock gravity as SpaceX steals the sector's air

SPCE dropped 28% on June 12 as the space sector got hammered by a short-seller report and the massive SpaceX IPO of SPCX.
Reddit attention on SPCE shifted from 'buy-the-wrong-ticker' theories to painful trader stories and broader sector bearishness.
The short-seller Fugazi Research called space stocks 'sci-fi wishes' whose premium will unwind now that SpaceX offers direct access.

From meme-stock theory to reality

$SPCE ended an ugly session on Friday down roughly 28%, a move that crystallized months of Reddit speculation about what would happen when the other space ticket started trading. The consensus thesis on r/wallstreetbets was that confused retail traders would accidentally buy

$SPCE instead of

$SPCX on IPO day and send Virgin Galactic's shares to the moon. Instead, the exact opposite happened:

$SPCX gained 28% while

$SPCE dropped the same amount.

One user on r/wallstreetbets summed it up dryly: “Not only did the market prove WSB wrong, it somehow inverse-WSB’d the trade with mathematical precision.” The post, which racked up over 1,000 upvotes, laid out how the supposedly degenerate trade — buy

$SPCE on the theory that low-IQ retail couldn't tell the tickers apart — was a clean loss for anyone who held through the day.

Real people, real losses

The chatter wasn't just theoretical. A trader on r/wallstreetbets detailed a realized $12,000 loss on

$SPCE after failing to sell at $6 during pre-market and watching the price open at $4. “I had seen 6 usd price but couldnt fucking sell during after or pre market,” they wrote. The loss was a stark reminder that holding meme stocks through sector rotations carries real downside, even for traders who had previously made $5,000 on the same name.

That personal story resonated: the post drew 1,108 upvotes and 224 comments, making it the highest-engagement

$SPCE-specific post of the day by upvotes.

SPCE

$SPCE

A short-seller's 'sci-fi' verdict

The broader sector rout was given extra fuel by a Benzinga report that Fugazi Research published a critical analysis of six public space companies on the morning of the IPO. In its report, Fugazi called the space sector a “capital recycling mechanism” with business plans that read like “sci-fi wishes” rather than viable commercial opportunities. The firm argued that the premium valuation many space stocks enjoyed was built on the idea that retail investors would buy them as proxies for SpaceX — a trade that now has less reason to exist.

On r/wallstreetbets, a post titled “Space(notX) is the biggest loser today” captured the mood, noting that every stock with the word 'Space' in its name was among the worst performers of the day, including

$FLY,

$YSS,

$ASTS, and others. The post read like an obituary for a trade that was suddenly unwinding all at once.

Two conversations about valuation

While

$SPCE was the ticker suffering, two other high-engagement Reddit posts wrestled with the fundamental question of whether any space company's valuation — including SpaceX's — makes sense right now.

On r/stocks, a user questioned whether a $1.77 trillion valuation for SpaceX is justified given its $5 billion annual loss and $18 billion in revenue. The post earned 1,355 upvotes and 756 comments, reflecting deep debate about whether the market is pricing a real business or a vision powered by Elon Musk's charisma. On r/investing, another user drew parallels to Cisco at the dot-com peak, calling the 94x revenue multiple for a money-losing company “the biggest stock market gamble in history.”

For

$SPCE, the conversation was not about its own business fundamentals but about being caught in the gravitational pull of a much bigger space narrative — one that suddenly had a ticker of its own.

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